Interleaf

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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (November 2006)

Founded in 1981, Interleaf was a company that produced a technical publishing software product with the same name. It was a competitor of the Adobe FrameMaker product. Broadvision acquired Interleaf in January 2000. The latest version of the publishing software is called QuickSilver and is still in use in many companies worldwide.

The Interleaf publishing system was notable for being one of several software packages (along with AutoCAD) that was keeping the use of the Lisp programming language alive in commercial software in the late 1990s.

Interleaf's headquarters was in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts.

1 Products
2 Acquisition by Broadvision
3 Conversion of Interleaf Format
4 References
5 External links

Products

Interleaf initially only had one product, Interleaf Technical Publishing Software, Interleaf TPS. Eventually the product name changed to be just Interleaf. TPS initially only ran on workstations ( Sun, Apollo etc.), but eventually it was ported the PC.

Interleaf/QuickSilver is a document authoring and composition package. It provides an integrated set of tools for creating compound documents: word processing, graphics, data-driven business charts, tables, equations, image editing, automated page layout, book building-- including automatic index and table of contents, and conditional document assembly.

It includes several features engineered to support the production of large and complex document sets, including: centralized control over parts or all of a document (format and/or content), global search and replace/change on individual graphics objects regardless of specific orientation or position and revision management.

Other Interleaf products, since retired, were:

Interleaf Relational Document Manager (RDM) - a database document management product integrated with Interleaf
Interleaf WorldView - an electronic document viewer, much like Adobe Acrobat
Interleaf WorldView Press - an extension to Interleaf which produced collections of WorldView documents which were searchable across the collection.
Interleaf Cyberleaf - a version of WorldView Press which produced HTML documents, | BYTE Magazine Editors Choice Award in 1995 ^[1]

Acquisition by Broadvision

After Broadvision acquired Interleaf it changed the name of the product to Quicksilver.

According to Broadvision product description, BroadVision QuickSilver enables you to create and publish lengthy, complex documents in multiple output formats (including HTML, PDF and Postscript) and automates publishing of personalized content to BroadVision Portal. Assemble publications from a variety of text, graphic and database sources, including Microsoft Word, AutoCad, Microsoft Excel, and Oracle. Includes a complete XML authoring environment.

Automatically assembles documents from a variety of sources including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and FrameMaker.
Supports complex authoring with reusable content and cascading changes, attribute tagging and conditional views, and automatic TOCs and indices.
Streamlines publishing to the BroadVision portal environment with automatic multi-file publishing, intra and inter-file links, and by leveraging qualifiers, categories and attributes in the portal.

Conversion of Interleaf Format

TagWrite (discussed below), created in 1988, is the oldest and most mature tool for conversion of Interleaf. (TagWrite was the first tag (markup) conversion software reviewed in PC Magazine in 1991 near the dawn of the personal computer era. ^[2].)TagWrite has been under continuous enhancement through 2008

Interleaf/QuickSilver does have an export filter to several file formats including RTF; however, there are vast gaps and errors in the quality of the filter. There is data loss, graphic failure, and the cost of manual cleanup after using the Interleaf filters is very high.

Precise conversion from Interleaf binary files is essentially impossible because there is no clean access to the actual data of a document. The ASCII version of Interleaf is highly complex and was designed to be machine readable. It is extremely complex in its coded expression of styling, auto-numbering, tables, graphics, microdocuments, automated references and cross-references, equations, and other features. Manual conversion of complex Interleaf documents with graphics is essentially impossible, or, in the case of relatively simple documents, at best very expensive presenting risk of human contamination of the complexly structured data and missing graphics.

Because of the small and specialized market for Interleaf conversion, Microsoft does not provide any converter. FrameMaker is unable to cleanly import certain Interleaf text and is seriously deficient in the conversion of critical aspects of Interleaf graphics.

A long standing conversion tool is ZANDAR's TagWrite[1]. TagWrite is a core software technology that is applied to custom built applications for precise conversion of complex Interleaf. According to ZANDAR,(established 1988), TagWrite converts virtually all features of Interleaf-including vector and raster graphics, tables of any complexity, styles, equations editable in MS Word, references/cross references and other automated features. Conversion can be to Rich Text Format (RTF)for import into Microsoft Word and other document formatters. Support for XML and FrameMaker 8 is available. The entire TagWrite conversion is conducted in computer memory, thus there is no risk of human contamination of the original data.